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FCAT Rubrics
Rubrics are the scoring guidelines or criteria used to evaluate all FCAT Reading, Mathematics, and Science performance tasks and FCAT Writing essays. The rubric describes what is required for each possible score point. Six separate documents provide rubrics for FCAT Reading, Mathematics, and Science, and three separate documents provide rubrics for FCAT Writing.
Holistic Scoring Method Used in FCAT Reading, Mathematics, and Science
Student responses to the FCAT Reading, Mathematics, and Science performance tasks are scored holistically by trained readers. The term holistic is used to emphasize the importance of the whole work, including the interdependence of its parts. A rubric is used to evaluate student responses to each task. Different rubrics are used for the different types of tasks (short- and extended-response). Holistic scoring is a method of evaluation that is used in many state assessments and involves judging a student response for its total effect. No single factor is weighted to the exclusion of any other.
Analytic scoring, on the other hand, is a method of scoring in which separate judgments or ratings are made for each of several traits. It is important to note that such separate analytic judgments are not made when scoring FCAT performance tasks. By scoring holistically, readers take all traits into consideration and give a single, overall score.
A rubric is a general guide for scoring. It identifies the performance features to be evaluated and describes how performance varies across the scoring scale. For the extended-response tasks, a 4-point rubric is used (4, 3, 2, 1). A 2-point rubric (2, 1) is used for short-response tasks. A score of "0" is used for responses that are completely incorrect, irrelevant, uninterpretable, or blank.
Holistic Scoring Method Used in FCAT Writing
The holistic scoring method used to score FCAT Writing requires trained readers to evaluate the overall quality of each student's draft. Rather than focusing on any one aspect of writing, readers consider the integration of four writing elements: focus, organization, support, and conventions.
Focus refers to how clearly the paper presents and maintains a main idea, theme, or unifying point.
Organization refers to the structure or plan of development (beginning, middle, and end) and the relationship of one point to another. Organization refers to the use of transitional devices (terms, phrases, and variations in sentence structure) to signal both the relationship of the supporting ideas to the main idea, theme, or unifying point and the connections between and among sentences.
Support refers to the quality of details used to explain, clarify, or define. The quality of the support depends on word choice, specificity, depth, credibility, and thoroughness.
Conventions refer to the punctuation, capitalization, spelling, and sentence structure. These conventions are basic writing skills included in Florida's Sunshine State Standards.
The FCAT Writing rubrics for Grades 4, 8, and 10 further interpret the four major areas of consideration into levels of achievement and establish the criteria for each possible score point 1 to 6, a 6 being the highest score.
Instructions for Download
FCAT rubrics are available in Adobe.pdf format and must be viewed with Adobe Acrobat Reader software. To obtain a copy of one of rubrics, click one of the links below to download the .pdf file. You may save it to your computer's hard disk, to a floppy diskette, or to a CD, or you may print the file. Please be aware that all printers do not support the printing requirements of .pdf files.